Tag Archives: Positive thinking

Blogging can be a stressful venture. You’re constantly trying to create original, creative content that makes a splash in the virtual information ocean. On top of that, your always wanting more people to “subscribe” whether to your e-mail newsletter, your blog content, or your YouTube channel (shameless plug here)

Early on in our blogging (though I still feel a year into it that we are very much newbies) every new e-mail subscription brought a tiny thrill of excitement. Whether it was because our message was resonating with people, or because they just loved receiving e-mail was of no significance to me.

On the flip side, every un-subscription notice came as a slight jab. What didn’t they like? Did we say something offensive? Would we change our content to get people to like us more, or stick to what we believed even if nobody agreed?

Have you ever been in a situation that dragged you down and left you feeling heavy? We’ve all had those and it’s usually difficult to shake off the bad feelings. In the following video, I describe a small strategy that will show you how to lift your mood.

I like to call this strategy the human helium balloon. We all know how light a helium balloon is and you’ll use this mental image to make yourself feel lighter. This strategy combines effective breathing and visualization and much more since it uses your other senses.

We are woken up by our alarms, digital or living, and then we proceed to shake the haze that is morning. We wash our face, dress for the day’s activities, eat some kind of breakfast or drink our life-sustaining beverage of choice and head out the door.

From here we interact with many different people, some of whom are predictable and others unanticipated. Most of the interactions are cordial at best, covering only the deepest level of interaction necessary to propel us forward to our next assignment for the day.

The other night while watching some playoff hockey, JF and I saw an advertisement for a game show called “Canada’s Smartest Person”. I haven’t seen the show so I can only presume it is a trivia and challenge show intended to test different types of intelligence, the prize being both money and bragging rights of being deemed the “smartest” (by a Canadian game show anyways, but that fact might remain unsaid).

This past weekend I attended the 14th annual YMCA-YWCA Connexion Fitness Conference for fitness professionals. It was a full day of seminars, workshops and networking with personal trainers, volunteers and fitness industry leaders. The keynote address was delivered by professor of Sport Psychology and author Terry Orlick. Terry talked about the keys to excellence, and how there are seven factors to achieving excellence in life: Commitment, Belief, Full Focus, Positive Images, Mental Readiness, Distraction Control and Constructive Evaluation. He combines these together as a wheel, in which each one plays an important role and cannot bring success by itself, but must be working in harmony with each of the other factors.

Life is like a restaurant, you have to choose what you’re going to get.

Have you ever been to a restaurant where nothing on the menu appealed to you? Or perhaps you experienced the opposite — you had so many options that you were overwhelmed and couldn’t decide what to eat.

Life can be a lot like that. Have you ever looked around at your circumstances and nothing appealed to you? Or perhaps you saw what everyone else had and wondered why your life couldn’t be more appetizing. The difference between a restaurant menu and your life is that you get to decide what gets prepared because you’re the chef. Sometimes life puts us into situations where we feel we don’t have any choices but to stay depressed and stuck. But the truth is, we can create choice.

I really enjoy reading. I don’t have as much time to do it as I’d like, and I will sometimes opt for the mental ease of watching television before I pick up a book, but I do enjoy reading. I hesitate to call myself a “reader” in the same way that someone who jogs recreationally hesitates to call themselves a “runner”. To them I always say, if you’re running voluntarily, then you’re a runner. The same sentiment could apply to reading as well, I suppose.

To everything – turn, turn, turn. There is a season – turn, turn, turn. And a time to every purpose under heaven. Cheryl and I found a new purpose this year, sharing our life, our love for life and life lessons we stumble upon along the way.

In case you don’t know me personally, or haven’t yet been overwhelmed by my fitness analogies, I like to work out. In fact, for the last few months it’s been something that I really look forward to doing. When days are tough or frustrating, I know that once I get under the weight of a heavy bar and push myself hard physically, I will feel so much better. Exercising frequently brings many great rewards, both physically and psychologically, but one unforeseen side effect was how scratched up my wedding rings would get from the weights.